[cpunks]

This is quite exactly why I would never consider using the Google cloud, or any customer-facing Google services for our business. Google is set up for B2B, not B2C. Their job is to minimize customer service calls. We use Google Apps at our business. The absolute only way we've been able to get useful support when something breaks was to either call up a VP-level contact, or call up a colleague who works at Google, and ask for a personal favor. This does not scale.

I also know of the number of serious Google bugs we've run into that we just didn't report because, quite frankly, we gave up on any bug reporting process having any effect.

Contrast this to Amazon where our rep can put us in contact with engineers in a few minutes, and who are of the caliber that they can e.g. help us recover a database where the RAID volume Amazon hosted it on was damaged in a power outage.

[gouranga]

I've had the same experience as well which is why we canned Google Apps during the trials for our business. We had a show stopper when doing a test exchange migration and we never got an email reply and never found a human to talk to that could help. That failed the risk mitigation criteria of the trial so we binned it.

I have absolutely no faith in them to actually sort something out in a reasonable amount of time.

Conversely, we used Office365 in the end and it blew up(ironically with a similar issue) during the trials. We had someone useful on the phone helping us in under 20 minutes!

I've not had much luck with Amazon, particularly S3 as we had a number of issues with the .Net client and they weren't very helpful. Stackoverflow was far more useful but I don't want to trust stackoverflow as a long term support option!

[cpunks]

With Amazon, we have a business support contract. The first-line phone operators are pretty bad -- they're neither technical nor fluent in English -- but we've been able to work up to competent people pretty quick in the one emergency we've had since launching. Both organizations are courting us pretty hard, so we may be a special case.

Google is a little weird. They've insisted on e.g. a conference calls with a half-dozen guys from Google, including one executive-level. That call was entirely one-sided. They told us about all sorts of features they were building because they thought our market segment needed them (zero of which were actually useful to us, and which they could have discovered with even very minimal market research). In that conference call, they didn't listen to any of our bugs or feature requests. Whenever we've submitted support requests through official channels, they went into what was effectively a black hole (sometimes, we'd get a slightly derogatory response from someone clearly powerless and clueless). Things we submit to through high-level contacts get handled -- roughly as well although slightly slower than normal, paid contacts at Amazon. The culture at Google is a little weird, at least with respect to dealing with large customers.

We do use Google Apps internally. It's imperfect and has showstoppers, but in my experience, corporate IT departments are even more imperfect, and have even more showstoppers. Based on our experiences, I'd be absolutely terrified of using Google for anything customer-facing.